The Cardinal’s Bad Memory

14ymedio, Mario Felix Lleonart, Havana, 12 June 2015 – As was expected,
Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s flat denial of the fact that there are still
political prisoners in Cuba has leaked from the interview granted to
Spain’s Ser Chain program Hour 25. It borders on the enigmatic how
someone in the position of this man is open to asserting something that
no one believes at all and that has done nothing for either the church
that he represents or he himself. It is obvious that such a nonsensical
statement shatters all of the church’s social doctrine that he is called
upon to support and practice.

But supposing that the prelate is so badly informed that he is ignorant
of the existing lists, like that of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights
and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), that include dozens of prisoners,
whether supporters of violence or not, but without doubt all
incarcerated for political reasons, one will have to add that the
cardinal suffers also from a memory deficit. Because the archbishop must
at least remember that on the eve of the visit by Benedict XVI on
February 28, 2012, he had to visit the political prisoner Ernesto Borges
Perez at Combinado del Este Prison to ask him to give up his hunger
strike because he was putting the Pope’s visit at risk.

Ernesto was amenable to the proposal of his pastor, who raised great
expectations of his liberation with the then-imminent visit. That hope
was frustrated, as before in 2010, when 126 prisoners were released, or
later, in December of 2014, when another 53 were freed after the
announcement of the re-establishment of US-Cuba relations. Many of us
came to think that it had been he for whom the liberation of the Wasp
Network spies had been negotiated, until we learned that in reality it
had been Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, sentenced for a reason similar to his.

Borges Perez has completed 17 of the 30 years of incarceration to which
he was sentenced after his death penalty was commuted. He was sentenced
for his effort to reveal the names of 26 spies that Cuban State Security
had ready to send to the United States. He was then the main analyst and
leader of the General Directorate of Counter-Intelligence and apparently
acted under the influence of the Glasnost and Perestroika winds that
were blowing in the USSR.

Converted to Catholicism in prison, where he survives as a fervent
believer who clings to his faith as his only lifeline of salvation, he
must have felt an enormous frustration after that visit by his pastor
who left satisfied on achieving his objective and has never returned to
see him. I doubt that the two letters of pastoral support addressed to
him by Benedict XVI through the papal nuncio mitigate his disappointment
on learning that his pastor did not even take account of him in his
interview with Hour 25.

I pray to God that history does not repeat itself and that Ernesto does
not again declare a hunger strike with the approach of the new papal
visit in September.

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